The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 13: El Chapo v. Flores Brothers, and Jack Handey’s Santa Fe

Episode Date: January 15, 2016

If Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug kingpin known as El Chapo, is extradited to the United States, he might face two formidable witnesses: identical twin brothers, former drug traffickers on a major scale, who gathered evidence against him for government prosecutors. Jack Handey tells some “Tales of Old Santa Fe,” where the cowboy past collides with the New Age present. And David Remnick talks with Alicia Garza, who co-founded Black Lives Matter, about the movement’s goals, and her issues with Hillary Clinton. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Tales of Old Santa Fe by Jack Handy. The old landscape painter. The old painter had painted more landscapes than he cared to remember. It used to keep him up at night. But nowadays, he soothed his nerves with whiskey. The worst part was there was always some young landscape painter who thought he was better. One day, just such a painter drifted in.

from Carmel by the sea, California. He had a carload of paintings, and he challenged the old landscape painter to a two-man show. Please, just head on back to Carmel, said the old painter. What's a matter, old timer, said the young painter. Yella? So the old painter agreed.

When the gallery closed that night, the old landscape painter had sold every one of his paintings, mountain views, Adobe houses, Southwest Sunsets. And the young painter hadn't sold a thing. Let me give you some advice, son, said the old painter. Folks around these parts don't really go for seascapes. The young painter got this car and drove straight through to Carmel without stopping.

Jack Handy reading his Tales of Old Santa Fe. We'll hear more from Jack Handy on the New Yorker Radio Hour today. I'm David Remnick and thanks for joining us. We've got a lot going on today. So it looks like the U.S. may finally extradite the drug kingpin, Joaquin Guzman Luera El Chapo. El Chapo was taken into custody in Mexico after a prison escape, a second prison escape.

That was just a gigantic embarrassment for Mexico's president. Now, one of the reasons the U.S. government wants El Chapo to stand trial here is that U.S. attorneys have a couple of star witnesses to testify against him. They're Americans, former drug dealers, who worked with the Sinaloa cartel and then became federal informants. Patrick Keefe has covered the drug war for years. Patrick, who are these guys? So there are a pair of identical twins from Chicago, Pedro and Margarito Flores.

They're Mexican-American. They're born in the U.S. and actually grew up on the west side. It's funny, you know, I've been writing about the drug trade for years, but there's this one aspect of the business that always remained kind of stubbornly mysterious to me. We all know about these big drug cartels in Mexico, and we know they import huge amounts of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine to the United States. And we're also probably familiar with the idea that there's a retail drug market here where people buy these drugs. But the one thing I've always been curious about is where do those two worlds intersect? Where do they meet?

Who are the middlemen who actually negotiate with the big suppliers who deal in kilos in Mexico and the street corner dealers who deal in grants? here in the United States. And these guys are the middlemen in some way? Yes. So they actually grew up in a family where their father, who was an immigrant from Mexico, had dabbled in the drug trade himself. But by their early 20s, they'd really gone into the business in a big way. And what they were were wholesalers. They would negotiate directly with Mexican cartels to buy just enormous volumes of drugs. What kind of volume? What kind of money are we talking about?

Literally tons of drugs. They imported tons and tons of cocaine to the United States, but also dealing in heroin and marijuana. And why were they so successful? Well, there are a few things that are required in order to do this. You need the kind of comfort level with people on both sides of the border. You need to be able to interact with people in Mexico, but also people here. The other thing you need to be able to do, which is really interesting, is buy these drugs on consignment, on credit. Because nobody puts down cash on the barrel for that volume of narcotics.

No kidding. That's the way you buy drugs is on consignment? All based on trust. What kind of trust can there be in that world? Oh, there's a great deal of trust when unwritten contracts are enforceable. death. Part of what made them so successful is there's a great deal of betrayal in the underworld, but these guys were twins. They were brothers. They were incredibly close. They could finish each other's sentences. And so this allowed them to really be a unit and they would never double cross one

another. Margarito was kind of more outgoing. He was sort of the relationships guy. Pedro was the logistics manager, but they worked very closely together. And they could kind of communicate in shorthand. The trust between them was unshakable. So what you had is the You had the front guy, the people guy, and the systems guy. Absolutely. Like in a business. That's amazing. And the other thing about them that distinguished them was that they weren't violent.

They were never violent. You remember that line from the famous line from the Godfather about how violence is bad for business? They really internalized this to a kind of astonishing degree. Wait, wait, wait, wait. They were basically drug lords, and yet they were of the nonviolent variety? Yeah. Working for very violent organizations, buying their drugs. I'll give you an example.

So at a certain point, one of the 20s. is actually kidnapped. Pedro is kidnapped by a rival in Chicago and held for ransom. And Margarito just pays a ransom of over a million dollars to get them released. They had a rough idea of who it was, who had done this, but did they go out and seek revenge? No, it would have been bad for business. They just accepted the loss and kept moving. So I'd always heard about the Flores twins, but I'd never really known a great deal about them. And then just recently, a guy named Tom Shakeshaft, who was a federal prosecutor in Chicago who had brought some really major cases

against the Sinaloa drug cartel retired. And he agreed to come in and talk with me about the Flores twins. And he told me that they were really just kids. They were born in 1981. At the height of their power, they were still in their mid-20s. Yet they became a kind of indispensable bottleneck.

Flores brothers were moving so much quantity of drugs and were making enough money that customers needed them worse than they needed any particular customer. And so they would just cut them off. The twins were thriving in Chicago, but eventually they got indicted in the U.S. And here's where their cultural fluency

on both sides of the border really helped them. What they did is they just moved to Mexico and relocated their operations and started essentially running their Chicago business remotely from down in Mexico. And that worked out pretty well. Until 2008, when their main supplier, the Sinaloa,

The Sinaloa cartel began to fracture. The Sinaloa cartel was part of what been referred to as the Federation, which included a number of cartel leaders who were working together. And that at some point there was a split within the Federation. Well, the Flores brothers were being supplied by two different cartels within the Federation. And when those two different cartels went to war with one another, the Flores brothers were put in a very tenuous position of getting an ultimatum from each side that the Flores brothers were to work only with that side or else.

This really sounds like the godfather, doesn't it, Patrick? I mean, you have a split in what's called the Federation, and the brothers have to decide what to do. Who do they go with? Exactly. It was an impossible situation. It turns out, however, there was a third option. They let it be known through a lawyer who is working for them

that they might be willing to cut a deal with the U.S. government. In other words, the Flores twins were going to flip. So Shake Shaft and a few of his colleagues traveled down to Mexico to debrief the twins and see if they were serious about actually coming over to the other side in the drug war. This wasn't as simple as it sounds. The Sinolo cartel is famous for having corrupted parts of the Mexican government. It's part of the reason Chapo Guzman, the head of the cartel, managed to stay at large for so many years.

So when Shakeshhaft and his team went down to Mexico to meet their potential informants, they had to do it in secret. They couldn't tip off the cartel that they were down there meeting with these guys, but they also couldn't tip off the government. That was one of the more James Bondian experiences I've ever had because I got picked up in an armor-plated Jeep at the airport and driven to a hotel. And then the next day we went to the U.S. consulate. And then got driven around the streets of Monterey at about 110 miles an hour

to make sure that nobody was following us and nobody knew where we were going. And we ended up going into the basement of a Western hotel in Monterey and taken up to a secure floor in that hotel with a lot of agents and other U.S. government personnel who had been there to make sure that it was a safe place to meet. And this kind of cloak and dagger stuff might be normal for a DEA agent, but ShakeShaff was just a lawyer. Well, when I started in the U.S. Attorney's office, I was still single. And this case all came along sort of just after I'd gotten married and just after I'd had my first kid. And the stakes go up when all of a sudden it's not just you.

There are other people relying on you. Sure. And I wrote a letter to my wife, and it was sort of explaining two things. One was the usual things you would say about, you know, that you love her and that kind of thing. The second, though, was trying to explain why I went. Because I had started this, I felt like it was my responsibility to go. And that, number two, that if I sort of chickened out of going at that stage, She wouldn't want to be with me anyway

because I'd be pretty miserable for having blinked in the eye of being personally nervous or scared about doing my job. Shakeshhaft and his colleagues were gathered in the hotel room when Pedro Flores walked in without his brother. He would be negotiating for both of them. They were largely inseparable in the sense of they had been in this together from the outset.

And it is my belief that if only one of them had wanted to cooperate, neither of them would have. Peter was slight, soft-spoken, a guy who would blend easily into a crowd. But as he started talking about the brother's operation, Shake Shaft was stunned. His initial description of the structure of his organization, and by his organization, their organization, and the volume of drugs that they were distributing on a monthly basis was jaw-dropping. The brothers agreed to help Shake Shaft and his colleagues in exchange for lenient treatment when it came to their own crimes. So while they were still in Mexico, what they did is they started making phone calls, negotiating deals with the cartel and recording them.

And because of their position in the cartel as these major figures, these wholesale buyers, there was no one they couldn't get to. On November 15th, 2008, Pedro placed a call to Chapo Guzman himself. He got to understand at that time, Chapa was the most wanted drug trafficker on the planet. There were no recent photos of him. People couldn't say for sure what he looked like. He was a rumor, a ghost. But Pedro just dialed him up.

Suddenly here was his voice saying, Amigo! How's your brother? I would say that once they decided, to cooperate, they became as good a cooperators as they had been drug traffickers when they were on the other side. Remember, the Flores brothers were supposed to be the biggest drug wholesalers in Chicago. So in order to keep up appearances, they had to continue importing drugs. And as the drugs arrived in Chicago, the feds would just happen to do a raid and seize them, which put the twins in a dicey situation.

And if you're seizing them, no money's coming back, right? There are no customers. So you're taking the consignment, and they have no way to... To pay for it. And that's one of the reasons that this couldn't go on longer. Because they're going into debt. Right. And to people who expect to get paid.

To put it mildly. Yes. On time. Now, hold on a second, Patrick. This is very complicated. The cartels are at war, and each one of them is demanding that the twins choose sides, right? So the brothers decide to keep doing business with... the both cartels and running the risk of alienating either one while tipping off the U.S.

government and recording phone calls with extremely dangerous men, right? So what made them so gutsy? Well, it's interesting. Tom Shakeshav said that it was partially guts, but it was also that they were very calculating. There were some practical reasons that they did all of that. One is that they are smart guys, and they knew that, if the government was to prosecute these folks, corroboration is the name of the game for a trial lawyer. And among the best corroboration that we can have when we try a case is real-time intercepted phone calls and conversations with the defendants as they are currently engaged in their drug trafficking activity.

For you guys who were working this from the government side, there must have been a conversation where on the one hand you're thinking, boy, this is such great stuff. And on the other hand, you're thinking we'd better pull them out if we ever want them to be alive long enough to testify. Was that a negotiation? That was my concern all along. And because if they didn't survive and didn't make it back to the United States, you've got no case against anybody. Those conversations, those recorded conversations become much more difficult to authenticate. at trial. You don't have live bodies to tell you the story. So there's a tension there between wanting to leave them in place as long as you can while you're continuing to get

this good stuff, while at the same time constantly being cognizant of the danger involved and knowing that at the drop of a hat, you may need to say, let's go. It's time to get them out. That happened on November 30th, 2008, less than a month after Shakeshaft and the DEA started working with them. It was a Sunday. A big shipment, a big payment was due to the Sinaloa cartel that day or the next day, on the order of somewhere between $4 and $6 million. I also learned that DEA was planning on perhaps searching and or seizing. some warehouses in Los Angeles. I became concerned that if, on the same day,

the cartel didn't get paid, and they had one or more of their warehouses raided, it raised the specter that the Flores brothers, rightly or wrongly, could get blamed for it. So you realize this is going to happen? This is going to go down the next day. So was there, so there must have been great urgency in terms of... We got them on the phone.

DA and I and we told them pack your stuff we're getting you out of there in two hours geez what happened once they got back to the United States So once the twins got back to Chicago Shakespeare knew that word would spread pretty quickly that they had betrayed the cartel But they still had time to catch some of the buyers

in the United States So the brothers start doing the same thing Making phone calls but this time they're calling a bunch of their customers To arrange deliveries and sting operations If you're imagining guys with guns pulling up in bleak industrial zones, that's not usually how it works. In the real world, a surprising number of drug deals happen at mundane places, McDonald's, or the parking lot of a mini mall. You do this job long enough and you realize how much drug trafficking takes place in front

of all of us all the time. I mean, I've had, you know, it's funny, I, you know, I'll drive by a mall where I am familiar with the picture of the Best Buy because I prosecuted somebody who routinely It doesn't take much to deliver, say, 10 kilos of cocaine. It's a duffel bag. It moves from one trunk to another. Eventually, word does get out that the brothers have flipped. And when it did, the threat of vengeance from the cartel, from all the people that they had betrayed, was so real that it got to the point where even their lawyers, so not the brothers themselves, but the lawyers for the Flores twins, requested anonymity, asking that their names appear nowhere in any of the public records. associated with their case.

All the Flores brothers' relatives have been told to stay in the U.S. where they could be protected by U.S. authorities and really never to go back to Mexico. But their father, interestingly, Margarito Sr., the guy who taught them the drug trade when they were growing up, he reportedly was really upset when he heard that they had turned on the cartel. He was really disgusted and didn't speak with them again. And eventually, he did go back to Mexico. It appears he may have had another family there, and he went down to visit them. While he was there, he was abducted.

A note was left on his car that conveyed that his abduction was related to the brother's cooperation. The note said, shut up, or will send you his head. It was a little bit of like your worst, your worst anxieties coming true, the sense that they could get to somebody. The twins' father's body was never found, and he's never been heard from since. Shikshaf had no idea how the brothers would react. That was morning.

I just walked in, and I said to them, and I mean, I said, you know, I'm the prosecutor, and you guys are the witnesses, but when something like this happens, we're all human, and today you can do whatever you want to do. I said, if you want to talk about him, I said, the only thing I can't let you do is just talk the two of you.

somebody has to be here, you know, an agent has to be here monitoring you. They were visibly distraught at both what evidently had happened to their dad and the fact that they had played a role in that happening. Did it discourage them from cooperating? It certainly did not discourage them from continuing to do what they were doing. And in fact, that same day, we continued to work. Was that their decision? Yes.

So at a certain point they said, let's get back to work. Yeah. And even as they were cooperating with ShakeShaff, out on the streets, the Flores brothers were being replaced in the drug dealing chain of command. I think it stands to reason. Common sense tells you there are still drugs available in the city of Chicago. I'm not so naive as to think that it maybe even made much of a dent in the overall war on drugs. I think we played a role.

I think it was a good case. In 2008, you know, probably the wholesale value of a kilo cocaine was about somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000. It went up after the Forage brothers were arrested. Today it's 35. Really? Mm-hmm. Because it actually made it harder to, it was a scarcer commodity just by virtue of taking them off the scale. Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of factors behind it.

I don't know that it was just them, but they certainly played a role. Patrick, I've got to tell you, I'm listening to this. And it's exciting. And of course, we want the feds to succeed and put the dealers in jail. But doesn't this all sound like a game of whackamol? It does. It really does. And it's funny, you know, the big role that the Flores brothers looked like they were maybe going to play was as star witnesses in the trial of Chapo Guzman.

But after he was arrested in 2014, Mexican authorities refused to extradite him to the U.S. They insisted he should really stay in Mexico and face trial their first. The Mexican Attorney General actually said, oh, we'll be happy to turn him over to the U.S. maybe in 300 or 400 years. It looks this time like after the escape last time, the Mexican government might be a little bit more inclined to turn him over to the United States. What's going to happen to the Flores brothers now? Well, it depends. If the Mexican government actually does turn him over and he gets extradited here, and that could happen anytime, you know, in the next few months, it could be six months, it could be a year. it'll depend a little bit on where he goes.

He's indicted in different jurisdictions across the country because his drug network was so vast that there are indictments against him in Brooklyn, in San Diego. And if he goes to Chicago, it seems fairly likely that the Flores Twins could end up actually taking the stand and testifying against Chapo Guzman. Regardless, at this point,

they're about halfway through this 14-year prison sentence that they're serving, and it looks like when they get released, they'll be placed in witness relocation. Now, Tom Shakeshaft, interestingly, thinks that if they do get put in witness protection, that the twins could survive as long as they follow the guidelines of federal witness relocation. And one of those guidelines holds that they have to be separated. They have to be in different places. They can't be in the same city.

It can't be in the same state. And it seems pretty unlikely that they'll actually honor that. They are, after all, inseparable. The thing that once made them so successful may eventually cost. them, their lives. Wow. Thank you, Patrick. Patrick Keith is a staff writer at the New Yorker. We also heard from Tom Shakeshaft,

a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Chicago. Pedro and Margarito Flores are serving out their sentences somewhere in the prison system under new names. Coming up this hour, Nathan Englander explains how nothing gets him ready for a day of writing like a grueling hour of CrossFit. engage.

Yeah. All right. When you get to this point after the deadlift, I believe it's the gym version of Whippets or something. You see little stars. Yeah, you see little stars after it. This is the New Yorker radio hour. More to come.

Tales of Old Santa Fe by Jack Handy. A bulto for his Nieto. One time a fancy dude from back east came and bought himself a double adobe casa on the east side. Then he went out and got a boulto for his Nietzsche. But the Nietzsche was too small for the boulto. He called in a brujo and asked him to use his powers to make the bulto fit. It don't work like that, said the brujo.

He quoted an old Spanish dicho. If your bulto doesn't fit in your nietzsche, you must either enlarge your nicheau or take the bulto back and exchange it for a smaller bulto. confused and angry, the dude went back east, never to return. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for tuning in to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week on the show, the veteran reporter Jane Mayer, who's covered national intelligence and the U.S. drone program,

investigates the Koch brothers, the billionaire businessmen and conservative activists. And they investigate her back. It's quite a story. Now, last year I went to Charleston, South Carolina, after the mass shooting, at the Emmanuel AME Church. One of the people I called to try to understand this inexplicable horror was Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is a very contemporary kind of movement.

It's not an organization in the traditional sense. It's a collective effort generated by digital organizing to put violence against African Americans, particularly from the police at the top of the national agenda. it came into existence after the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin was acquitted of murder in 2013. And at that point, Garza and several others began talking about the incident on Twitter. After George Zimmerman was acquitted, I think there was a real sense. I mean, I can speak for myself and other black folks that I know,

not just that justice had not been served, but that that verdict essentially said to black people across this country that our lives don't matter. that we can be holding skittles and a nice tea and still be killed, that we can be sitting in our cars and gas stations listening to loud music and be killed, that we can be knocking on someone's door and asking for help and be shot. You have a brother, don't you? I do. He's 26. And when you were thinking about this acquittal,

it may have popped into your head that this could have happened possibly to you, but maybe even more immediately to your brother. Is that true? Absolutely. When I heard the verdict, my brother was actually the first person I thought about. My brother is an amazing person, and he's one of the sweetest people you'll ever meet. But unfortunately, for some people, when they look at him, they don't see that. And they'll never take the opportunity to get to know him because he's over six feet tall, and he has a huge afro. and for some people, that's intimidating. Yeah?

And I have a real fear for him because he, God bless him. He lives his life every day as if nothing can happen. And fortunately, we grew up in a community that's so small that everybody knows each other. Where is this? This is in Marin County. What does he do? He works for my parents. But beyond that, he's doing what?

Oh, my parents are antique dealers. So what's the conversation like between the two of you? You know, it's not a conversation that we agree on, quite frankly. But ultimately... But you tell him what and he answers what. You know, we have conversations about whether or not black people are targeted, right? He doesn't agree with you? Not always.

I mean, I think there is a popular narrative, right, that we all have the same shot. and that it's really a question of how hard we go for it. And I wish that were true. I wish that were true. You know, we had a lot of conversation, actually, during the last election. He was a supporter of Ron Paul. Whoa, whoa. It caused a lot of tension in our family.

But, you know, let's break that down for a minute. And he was a supporter of Ron Paul. Why? Because he really felt like it was important that people had. had individual freedoms. And that's something that I think we can all connect to. Now, if you walk it out a little bit farther, you start to see there's actually some pretty big differences there. And you walked it out for them. Unsuccessfully. We struggled together and we came out still loving each other on the other side. Fair enough. We've never met before. No. I have talked to you on the phone once before.

That's right. I called you. And at one point I said to you, well, what do you think about the role of the church? in Black Lives Matter as opposed to the traditional civil rights movement. And you said, you know, I'm not too solid on that issue. I was raised Jewish. That's right. Talk about shifting expectations and identities. So my dad is Jewish. My mom converted.

And, you know, I'll be really honest. I mean, I think that's why we're here. I'm glad. So, you know, people go, I never meet black Jews. And I'm like, we exist. Yeah. Right. And also, I think for my family in particular, my family was culturally Jewish, and they were not very conservative in terms of their beliefs.

You're also self-identify as gay and married to a Latino trans person. So this is not, as one T-shirt once said, this is not your grandparents civil rights movement. So tell me a little bit about your growing up and who you are. and those identities, as you describe them. In five minutes or less. I'm standing on one foot. I would say that my growing up experience was always feeling like I had one foot in two worlds. So, you know, my mother comes from a more working class family in Toledo, Ohio.

My father comes from San Francisco, and he was actually raised in a family that had some level of wealth. And even growing up, so the first part of my life, I spent. in a relatively working class community in Marin County. And then later in my life, we moved to a very wealthy community. So certainly being a young black girl, going from a predominantly multiracial community, but predominantly black and Latino, to a community that was predominantly white, was not a small feat. What are the biggest hurdles, the biggest problems,

the most trying conditions that are now in front of our eyes. Because I know that Black Lives Matter has made a point over and over again of saying, yes, we are always present at rallies having to do with police abuse and worse, but it's a much broader movement than that has to do with not only institutional racism, but actually any number of other subjects as well. What is the condition now that is most urgent to you, set of conditions that are most urgent to you? urgency and, you know, ability to solve it in our lifetimes are two very different things.

But certainly, I think for us, what we want broadly, if we were to talk about our vision and our demands, we want a world where black lives actually matter. And not just in relationship to the police, but in relationship to the basic human rights that we all should be afforded, right? Safe housing, quality, decent housing, decent school. community control over the things that impact our lives, being able to have access to a wage, right, that will sustain you and sustain your family. Of course, I mean, we could go on and on and on and on and on. So in August of last year, Hillary Clinton had a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists, and their discussion became, as you remember really well, very, very heated. And she said, look,

you're interested in changing hearts and that can go on forever and maybe you'll succeed, maybe you won't. I'm interested in as a politician in changing laws. What was your level of satisfaction with that encounter? And is she wrong? What I will say is, and this isn't being diplomatic, right? This is just trying to allow. Why would you want to be diplomatic? I don't have a reason to be. It's trying to allow multiple perspectives, right? So to be fair,

no change in this country has ever happened merely by changing laws. And it was disappointing, quite frankly, to hear former Secretary Clinton use that language because certainly an accurate view of history shows us that we are always in a dialectical relationship between changing culture or changing hearts and changing policy. And that if we don't do one, the other one doesn't happen, right? I also was really disappointed that she used what I thought was a fantastic opportunity to sit and really build with young black activists who had come specifically to share their concerns with her. That she used that opportunity to almost shun them as opposed to, you know,

to try. Shun or lecture? Both, to be honest, because there were some pointed questions that were being put forward to her. And one of those pointed questions was about her changing. Did you want her to share her view and her view of things? Well, let me be clear. One of the pointed questions that she was asked was about her changing stance on mass incarceration. Right.

Now, you know, I grew up in the era of mass incarceration when black people in. in particular, were being demonized and seen as a drain on government resources. And, you know, former Secretary Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton, really moved this very robust agenda around criminalizing black people. And they did that in a couple of different ways. One was bypassing and championing this landmark three strikes legislation, which actually incarcerated more black people than any other time in history, right? And they also did something that was overwhelming, which was to dismantle state supports for families to be able to thrive, or just at the very least, survive, right?

And they did that under this notion, right, that people were taking advantage of the system and that people are not redeemable. And now what we see on the campaign trail is that there's, suddenly this news stance that says mass incarceration is a horrible thing, right? And the question that those activists posed to her of what changed your mind is not an out-there question. It's really not. In fact, I thought it was brilliant. And you thought she got defensive? Well, she did get defensive. And she got dismissive. And she also didn't answer the question. And you could vote for her? Well, no, I'm not. And mostly, you know, have been impacted by that experience very much. I do believe that, you know, dialogue is

necessary. We get to November. The likelihood is it's going to be Hillary Clinton against, I don't know, Ted Cruz or Marco Ruby or Donald Trump. You're going to stay home? You're going to pull the lever for the Republican? No, no, no. I definitely plan to vote. I'm not going to vote for Hillary Clinton. That's where my stance is. And I'm not voting for any Republicans. So in other words, It's a third party. Can I remind you? Ralph Nader was also a third party candidate. I remember. I do think it's troubling that we do something in this country where we go, if you don't vote for the appointed ones, everything's going to go to hell. That's not actually true. What is true, certainly, is that there are multiple things that are important for us to make decisions about.

And president is one. And the reason for that being Supreme Court appointees. Yeah? But I also want to be really clear that for black people in this country to demand allegiance to a candidate that has deliberately, deliberately lessen their quality of life, I think is irresponsible. When you see the percentage of African Americans who have in fact said that they'll vote for Hillary Clinton, does it make you despair in some way? Because it's very, very high, as you know. No, it doesn't make me despair in any way. I think what we know about black voters is that we tend to vote Democratic. And we tend to do that across the board. In a sense, you feel that you give away the vote too cheap. I absolutely feel that way.

Let's go to another politician. He happens to be the president of the United States. Barack Obama, do you get a sense from him that he's behind you and Black Lives Matter? I get a sense, I mean, you know, I don't know the man, so I can't definitely say that. But I get a sense that there's many things that we share in common. But I think that Obama's Achilles' heel is that there's a way in which he cares so much also about the culpability and responsibility of black people to act, right? that in some ways it tends to water down some of the impact that he can have. In other words, what you object to is the cultural critique, the hitch up your pants, that part of his. Yeah, and let me give some examples.

I mean, I think after Trayvon Martin was killed, yes, he does what is considered an epic speech because he had not addressed race in his entire presidency up until that point. So it's considered epic, but really what he said was very basic, which was that could have been my son. Right? At the same time, he then calls for peace. And he says, you know, people need to, you know, get it all the way together, basically. Which is a troubling message in a situation where... It's troubling for the president to call for peace on the street? In a situation where it takes two months for George Zimmerman to even be charged. Yes. So you would have him implicitly support unrest on the street? I would have him implicitly support the demands of the family that the man who killed their child be held accountable. And he did not do that.

He did not do that soon enough. And he did not do that even as he was saying, yeah, something's very wrong here. But you know what he says in those instances. He says, look, we have to let the justice system do its work. Of course. We're all making choices here about how we lead. And, you know, I'm not saying this to disparage. him, but I am going to be very, very frank when I say, as the leader of this nation, it is your

responsibility to say it is not okay for it to take two months to charge a man who has killed a 17-year-old child for no reason. It is not okay. And the thing that should be coming out of your mouth is not there needs to be peace. It should be, there needs to be justice in this situation. And I'm calling on the police department in Sanford, Florida to press charges. That would have been the speech of his life. That was Alicia Garza, who was one of the founders of Black Lives Matter. There's more to come on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stay tuned. I'm David Remnick. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, once again, Jack Handy. Tales of Old Santa Fe by Jack Handy. The Tale of Ali McGraw. Seems there was a rumor going around that Ali McGraw was going to move out of Santa Fe. A contingent from the mayor's office showed up at her door. Ali, we heard you might be moving out of town, said the mayor. Please don't do it. Before you came here, Santa Fe wasn't fit for women or children.

Don't worry, mayor. I ain't a-going nowhere's, said Allie. But tell me, who started this dang fool rumor? Alan Arkin, said the mayor. The next time Allie saw Arkin, she threw a shot of whiskey in his face. Arkin drew the Derringer he always carries, but Alley slapped it out of his hand. To this day, when folks see Alley on the street, they make the motion of someone throwing whiskey in someone else's face. Jack Handy is the author of what I'd say to the Martians. and other books. You can hear some other stories he's recorded at New Yorkeradio.org.

Nathan Englander is a writer mainly of short stories. They're fast, they're funny, quirky, not unlike Nathan himself. He's been published in The New Yorker since 1999. Now Englander is working on a novel, and he says he's added pretty much every waking minute, six, seven days a week, except when he's at the gym, doing CrossFit with his trainer, Noah Abbott. You want to warm up? Just row, like easy row for a couple minutes. And then we'll do a little Tabata interval piece after we're done with that. Tabada, we're not doing the Anthropology Day at CrossFit, but at Tabata's 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. Really, what I want to talk about is how it feeds into the rest of my life and into my writing and all that stuff, CrossFit metaphysics.

What do you call it, like, the genetic plot? You've talked, you've explained, can you talk about genetic? This is a eugenics course here. Yeah, it's true. But what do you call it, the genetic maximum? Genetic ceiling. Yes, would you talk about that? Well, it's an idea, it's a way of kind of getting people to understand that they're kind of training for themselves, rather than for the guy next to them and the guy next to them and the guy next to them.

Well, I think that's what interests me. Like, the whole part of writing in our writing lives is this weird, it's like a lottery life if you dedicate yourself to fiction. You just don't know your potential. Like, you know, that's why everybody loves those stories of like J.K. Rowling rejected 9,000 times. Right. Now she just bought whales. You know, like, you know, like, these, you don't know your limit. And in here, it's really, what I kind of like about it is it's so competitive, but against yourself.

And, yeah, that's a comfort for me. Right. Yeah. So, four rounds, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. Oh. You go double under's box jumps. So double, I'm going back and forth. Yeah, go back and forth.

You'll alternate between the two. Okay. It took me almost, I think, a year after you walked in the door to kind of, you kind of, realize who you were. It's like, I read him in college. That's funny. Right. New voices in Jewish fiction. Yeah, yeah. I knew what course it was. And you're like, yeah, that's my wheelhouse, my sweet spot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What brought you here? Like, where did you... Oh, everything's about writing or Judaism with me, as you know, and where the Twain meet. Anyway, but almost weirdly, I would, like, trace it to book tour. I'm 45 years old, which,

traditionally, historically, historically for a writer, I would be dead now, like one out of three. debtor, you know, drinking my way there. But yeah, so I feel like it was like after last book tour or something, which if all goes well with the book, they send you around and you travel and I'm polite. So in Stockholm, you want me to have dessert? I have dessert. You want me to have another drink in Mississippi? I have a drink.

Point is I get off that airplane after it's done on. And I feel like basically like a 200 pound bag of salt. You know, you easily, like, fall out of routine, which I think where writers are so neurotic about being interrupted because you think, like, one day off I'll just be like in bed drinking grape knee high and watching the view for the rest of my life. But the point is I was looking to, like, get back to routine and a friend, he's like, you got to go, you got to try it. Here you go, nice and soft.

Good. It's really pretty imposing to show up here. I enjoy the sound of the clang now, but there's just a lot of clanging and banging and big men and women, like, lifting a lot of weight and doing a lot of stuff that until you put in the months and the time is extraordinarily hard. Relax. I'm not going to take a deep breath in not pass out. All right. Then I have to say also, you're always nice, but everybody gets really nice after you show you're dedicated. I don't mind that in life.

As a suburban, lazy, lazy, lazy suburban child who was raised by a TV set and did not go outside, like, it took so many years, like decades literally to train myself to sit and to push and to write. Try one more round at double under. I made the rope a little shorter. That felt different. I am finishing a book now, and I am so. I believe the medical term is men. I am unstable with how hard the work is now. And it's like, that was it yesterday, like,

just didn't have it in me. And I was like, you sit there, I will dig. I'm in an hour and another hour. And by like hour three, I was in and the world fell away and I got my work done. I am working better and more efficiently since coming here. Head through at the top, right? Push that barbell back over here.

There you go. With 10? Sure. Yep, that's 11. I get into things obsessively. My lunchtime vinyasa with friends turn to like a four day a week MISO practice. Like, I want to bake, learn to bake.

Like, I'll make, like, 600 apple pies to look like the picture. And, you know, and people say, like, aren't you fencing anymore? But I have to say, of all the things, you know, I'm just full up a CrossFit Kool-Aid. I do feel like this is something that does have staying power. I think it does in the sense that it's like CrossFit didn't invent exercise. You know, it's just done a better job of kind of packaging it. Yeah, like, actually just those lessons about the slow build of life. Like if I, you know, started lifting, like, you know, one pound of something when I got here.

A hundred weeks later, I'm like, I just broke a hundred last month. You know what I'm saying? It's that notion of building. Seeing yourself improve both in the micro and the macro. It's like getting a paragraph right and getting a book right. Ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Okay.

Get a little narrow, push your knees out hard against your arms, chest and hips together. Yeah. All right. When you get to this point after the dead lift, you sort of, it's like, I believe it's the gym version of whipets. or something. You see little stars. You know, I think it's an interesting thing about kind of like obsession. You know, I have to have this discussion with people every so often about overtraining. Coming too often, working too hard, and you can just tell things start going in the other

direction, right? That gets a big hallelujah for me. That's the exact point where I'm like, I write so many years of seven days a week. I work so hard to have like one day a week off. It is better for you. Like those lessons are really hard to learn when you've committed to something. Yeah, it's hard to realize that, like, you do better. better with some rest. As I said it out loud about writing, and as I hear saying it, it still

computes like news to me. Like, I really, it really is a struggle to remember, like, you know, like a day off will feed you or like, you know, my wife will say, you know, like, Thanksgiving is a national, you cannot write on Friday too, like, because I'm not taking the whole weekend. Let's not get crazy. You got two and a half off on that side? Yes, sir. I'm going to ten on. Wait a minute. Yeah, take another minute. The writer Nathan Englander at CrossFit South Brooklyn. His most recent book is The Story Collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About, Anne Frank. We're just about done today, but before we go, here's a guy I want to meet and I want you to meet. His name is Larry Wood, and he is a master, the all-time greatest, the champ, at something very specific, the New Yorker caption contest.

It's something we do every week here. We print a cartoon, online and in the magazine without a caption. send in suggestions, the cartoon editor Bob Mankoff and his team pick three finalists, and then readers vote to pick the winner, the funniest caption for that particular image. Larry Wood is a seven-time winner of the caption contest. He is the Muhammad Ali and the Joe Lewis and the Ronda Rousey of the contest. There's no one even close. How does he do it?

I'm glad you asked. The New Yorker Susan Morrison tried to learn the secret. I get up Monday morning, and first thing I'm just, I do is I check the New Yorker website and take a look at the caption. I just stare at it for about 10 minutes. That's when the idea start to come usually. I understand that you have a process for writing your captions. Would you like to walk us through that?

Sure. Part of it is a puzzle. Cartoons that get submitted to the contest usually have two frames of reference. So you've got to come up with a caption that makes sense of the cartoon. And then you've got to make it funny. Right. The first contest that I once showed a panhandling dolphin and the guy's reaching in his back pocket to give him some money and the woman's yelling at him. And I had her say, if he's so damn intelligent, let him get a job.

The real competition, I think, comes in becoming a finalist. That's the hard thing to do. Once I come up with all the captions that I'm considering, and it could be anywhere from three to ten, I'll email them to this group of friends. And they're brutally honest. They're just telling me which ones they think are fun. And if I think they're right, then I'll go along with them. I see. I see. I know that you have a get-out-the-vote strategy. Once cartoons are finalists, then people can vote on them.

Tell me how you go about doing that. I will – I'll send out an email to everybody I know, everybody my wife knows. I ask them to use social media, which I really don't know how to use. Do you think this is fair? Does an air suspicion hover over the victories like Kennedy beating Nixon? Fair. Who cares if it's fair? No, my feeling is that if you're a final, I believe all finalists will do this. I think once you become a finalist, of course you're going to tell everybody about it.

Interesting. I know that you once came up with the winning caption but didn't actually win. When that happens, shouldn't you sue us? That's a good idea. I think that it happens all the time to a lot of people. I think sometimes people have the same idea. I mean, you've got 5,000 to 7,000. and people who are entering the contest every week.

A lot of them are going to be coming up with the same joke. So I imagine that this happens on a fairly regular basis. I'm sure. Well, I find that people with good senses of humor fall into one or two categories. They're the people who laugh uproariously at other people's jokes. And then there are the people who kind of stand there and stroke their chin and say, hmm, that's funny. And a lot of professionals fall into the second category.

But you sound like a good laffer on the radio, at least. least what? Oh yeah. No, I think I'm a lapper, but I guess if you're seeing it all the time, you can't really laugh, you're judging it. And you just will say, yeah, that's funny, that's not funny, but you're never really enjoying it. And Bob Mancough talks about this as well. But I have to say, you've got to be careful or Bob Mancough is going to start attaching electrodes to your head.

Larry Wood, seven-time winner of the New Yorker Caption Contest. If you want to try your hand at it, go to contest.newyorker.com right now. There's a drawing of two medieval-looking guys operating a guillotine that has a boxing glove instead of a blade. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week, I'll talk with Juno Diaz, which is always fun. And Jane Mayer talks about the Koch brothers, which is less so. Have a great week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC, Steve. studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Toon Yards. Thanks to Keith Fullerton Whitman for additional music this hour. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sharon Mishie, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Becky Cooper, Matt Fiddler, and Eric Malinski. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Tales of Old Santa Fe by Jack Handy.

The wailing woman. Despite warnings from friends and relatives, a local lady bought an expensive turquoise necklace from an unlicensed jeweler. The turquoise turned out to be fake, nothing more than blue powder held together with a kind of clear resin. In despair and humiliation,

the woman killed herself. Now, on moonlit nights, her wailing ghost wanders the hills in a royals, of Santa Fe, demanding her money back.